


Gratitude Be Of Blue

by MistyBeethoven



Series: "Yes, I Really Am This Pathetic!" or "How to Say I Love You With a Story" [79]
Category: A Scanner Darkly (2006)
Genre: Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, Drugs, F/M, Healing, Home, Hope, Hopeful Ending, Love, Love Stories, Love Triangles, Mental Disintegration, Overweight, Pregnancy, Self-Indulgent, Self-Insert, Spies & Secret Agents, Thanksgiving, Waiters & Waitresses, Weight Issues, gratitude
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:41:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27718331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MistyBeethoven/pseuds/MistyBeethoven
Summary: Robert Arctor, set free from New Path,  delivers the blue flower of Substance D to the agents that destroyed his life, but finds gratitude still colored blue as he falls in love with a waitress.
Relationships: Bob Arctor/Me, Robert Arctor/Donna Hawthorne, Robert Arctor/Me
Series: "Yes, I Really Am This Pathetic!" or "How to Say I Love You With a Story" [79]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1589944
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	Gratitude Be Of Blue

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Thanksgiving Keanu and everyone! This is one of two Thanksgiving Day fics I wrote. The other features Tommy Warneki and is generally just sex. This one is more serious.
> 
> Not that it doesn't have a bit of sex.
> 
> For a while, I wanted to do a fic with Bob Arctor and Thanksgiving and the blue flower. I finally was able to today. Writing it, though, and contemplating the horrors of drug addiction, I think it's really important to address that simply getting rid of a drug won't necessarily stop the problem. Many addicts go on drugs to help escape painful factors in their pasts or presents. Addicts need mental and emotional support to help solve the problem from the source. Otherwise it's like taking the leaves or branches off of a tree; if you leave the root, it will only return.

_Blue_.

When Bob Arctor thought of the color for gratitude it was always _blue_.

His brain had long ago stopped working in a way that resembled anything normal. Even now, when he was closer to forming thoughts that were rational, in line and coherent as they had been before his addiction to Substance D, Arctor could be suddenly derailed. For instance, he would need to use the washroom at the diner where his girlfriend worked or the the apartment that they shared, only to find himself walking down the street, halfway to a washroom he was not exactly sure of the location anymore. All that he would remember was that once it had been in his home too.

Sometimes they would find him then, the police or a good Samaritan, and call, Erin. She would show up, still wearing her waitress uniform, looking as grateful to see him as he was to see her and his thankfulness would return.

Because even if you didn't know where you were, as long as you had someone willing to find you, you could never truly be lost.

Often, he would know the confusion stemmed from his inability to resolve himself with what was real and what was false; whom he had once been to whom he was now.

Despite these moments, it was much better now than when he had been some computer walking around, just set on autopilot and trying not to upset anyone so that they would think everything was fine and he wouldn't feel as horrible as he had at New Path.

That was where he had started to associate thankfulness with blue, however.

They had moved him out of the complex so he could work under a sky all day and out in the fields with the living things. Living things under a sky of blue. The sky seemed very striking then after being caged for so long. Gazing up at it, Bruce, no _Bob_ , had made the first connection between the color and how it was a catalyst that had brought with it something to be grateful for.

Maybe that was why, when he had seen the pretty blue flower, something had happened inside of his mind. There had been a clicking, almost audible, and a feeling of recognition and...no...it hadn't really been the sky that had caused it. He heard the whisperings of someone that sounded like himself, whispering about something he _needed_ to find. But the flower had been so beautiful, like the sky he was grateful to see again, that he had stopped to listen to that familiar voice which sounded a lot like him and he had found himself taking the flower. He had placed it in his shoe to bring to his friends when he was allowed to leave at Thanksgiving.

Then perhaps, he thought, they would be filled with a thankfulness too.

And they had been.

Sent to the station first, the one he remembered in his nightmares, where a shorter man? woman? whom had always changed their face and several others had looked at the flower with more joy than they had offered him. Bob was not jealous of the flower, that did not earn eyes that darted away instantly, as if they associated the viewed with guilt as much as he associated blue with something to be thankful for. No, he was proud of it.

 _"They've just been trapped for too long too,"_ Bob Arctor had thought and been confused why they were calling him Bruce, like at New Path. _"They sit behind their desks and...and..._ (THEY RUIN PEOPLES' LIVES) _...and I really should pity them. Because they are still trapped. I can walk out of here, they told me I could, and they're telling me again, but they remain trapped."_

So it was only right, Arctor reasoned that they kept the flower when they sent him away again, promising to give him a place to stay and some money and that he would never need to return to New Path. That way they could remember the sky when they looked at it and give thanks as well.

Thanks was a blue flower.

Gratitude was a fat waitress in a blue uniform too.

He's wandered into a diner once and found her. The name on her nametag never seemed to stay inside of his mind for long but would always fly off. He thought he discovered the answer for that later but right then, in those early days, his thoughts were so out of order he thought she had blurry printing.

Robert Arctor often felt like a five year old given a stick to hit a pinata with. Only when he could never find it, he had torn the blindfold off only to discover that the lights were off. When hitting the switch, had caused no light to come flooding in, he had reached for his eyes and found them gone. Then he had realized that he had been blind all along. It had been only self delusion all along leading him to the belief that he had ever been able to see anything.

Living on his meager salary from the poor caged agents, Robert had made his way to the diner everday for the waitress and her unreadable name. She had been a pretty looking thing with big green-gray eyes that could sometimes trick him into seeing blue skies or flowers. Her long brown hair was curled and tied at the back, resembling cork...

screws...

Wine.

Another substance like that of D, but not quite as bad.

Then again it was all about quantity and what your body could handle.

And after the caged animals had forgotten their gratitude for the fact that he had brought to them the blue flower, they took away his salary and his small apartment, as well, the pretty, plump waitress had invited him to stay with her and he had handled her body too and found it surprisingly addictive.

At first, he had slept on her couch. But it was hard to sleep on the couch and shake without falling off of it. When the shaking occurred, his body telling him foolishly that he needed a dangerous drug, he ended up falling on the floor. It had happened repeatedly but his roommate, thankfully had never heard it.

One blessed day, she had changed her bedsheets to blue.

An invitation, his brain had declared, and so Bob Arctor had crawled into her bed one night, just as he had always longed to do. And when the trembling had started, then she had wrapped her chubby arms around him and held him on their bed of blue, keeping him in it like a human seatbelt.

Once again, blue had earned his gratitude.

So much, infact, that one night, he could not help himself. He found himself kissing her, his thankfulness overflowing. Only, somewhere along the way, his mind had become lost again and he was making love to some other woman; one whom had once filled him with gratitude and lust and yearning.

Suddenly then, he was making love to Donna and not the kind and sweet waitress. When he entered her she was tighter than he would have thought but then Donna never let herself be touched, so lost in the thrall of her own addiction. And she cried in pain but he was there to show her how he could make it better if she let him. And she let him. Her own gratitude coming forth bright blue.

"DONNA!" he cried out at his climax, not knowing why she had ever denied him for so long when she too had to have known it could be this beautiful.

Only when he pulled out of her and lay to his side, he heard her crying and he started to cry too because he knew he had caused the other one pain...the waitress...pain. As much as he always felt lurking in the back of his head. So he wept for his waitress and he wept for himself and his Donna, whom he had never really had anyway because he was not her drug.

The woman beside him, had slid closer towards him and held him again; now not only his roommate but his lover.

Sometimes, Bob thought that she wasn't his lover at all but really his angel.

She had felt so bad for him that she had ended up letting him taint her with his human seed. Because of this she had been unable to fly back on up to heaven. Angels full of human cum often found it hard to take to the skies again. A guy's seed was for earthly matters and carelessly, thinking she was a girl named Donna someone he used to know, he had crept into her bed one night and shot her full of it. Something she had let him do every night until she was so full of cum that her wings must have broken and the next time God called her home she could not go.

But Bob Arctor had lived in fear of her wings healing. They were blue broken but would become gray if they were ever healed.

And so, Bob Arctor had ravaged her more and more because he wanted her so heavy she could not leave him. And he called her Donna for her name eluded him and he often confused the two anyway.

But he loved his corrupted angel.

Her name had clicked inside of his head one day when the other angel Donna had returned to say goodbye and that she was sorry. It was hard to remember the name of more than one Angel he had finally understood. They were too light it seemed. While their bodies were soft and warm and you could love them and plant your seed in them if they let you, as the second Angel had let him if not the first, their names were airy, floating things, made of sky and heaven of blue.

Blue.

Angels, once again, were _blue_.

With Donna's name losing its power, watching her walk out a full human as all angels had once been anyway, Erin's name had come clearer and that night he could offer it to her as his act of devotion and gratitude.

Erin.

So her name was blue too.

And with her name coming to him through the fog, along with her joy at his saying it, hope was colored blue too. For he had arrived at some semblance of a new life with his angel, whom kept flapping her wings but could not get any farther from him than the clouds because his seed was tying her thankfully to him.

On the Thanksgiving the year following his handing over of the blue flower, his Erin told him with teary eyes that he had found another way to make her heavier and keep her with him.

She was pregnant.

"Are you mad?" she asked, astoundingly acting as if she were afraid _he_ might be the one upset for her not returning home.

He took hold of her then and held her as tightly as she held him when he suffered his withdrawals. "Never," he whispered, feeling that at last one of his seeds had been successfully planted and he need never worry again that his angel would be stolen from him.

In that moment, his mind feeling clearer than it ever had since he had taken the child of the blue flower into his veins, Robert Arctor learned to let go of all his former lives, accepting that he had only been some soul living out all human reincarnations in one single lifetime, and stopped caring about what was truth, focusing on what he had now instead of what he had lost.

For what he had was weighted and beautiful.

"Can I ask one favor?" the man asked, still holding her tightly.

"Anything," the woman replied.

"Even if it's a girl can we paint the bedroom blue?"

"Of course," Erin replied. "It's my favorite color."

"Mine too," Bob Arctor said and kissed her head in rich blue thankfulness.

**Author's Note:**

> Dear Keanu;
> 
> I wore my new blue jacket out today. I got it on sale online for really cheap. Blue is my favorite color and I love my new jacket. I just hope that I don't look like the blueberry girl from Willy Wonka. :/
> 
> For this Thanksgiving, I am really grateful that I have you, figuratively speaking. I was in so much pain beforehand. You cut a light through that darkness. For that, I will always love you and be colored blue with gratitude. :D <3
> 
> Much love,  
> Erin  
> XO XO  
> :D <3


End file.
